Just a guess here, but it seems someone is not happy about recent developments and decided to make a little statement. We will probably see more of this type of thing in days ahead. Stay away from troubles.

Could be as you guessed. I noticed in the article “officials” were quick to call it sabotage and blame it on terrorists. I see this kind of stuff all the time in the cell phone industry. We have copper stolen off our sites daily. Sometimes thieves cut a cable only to find out it is fiber or aluminum wire and they just leave it where it sits. The article also mentioned an excavator was used to uncover the pipe. I don’t know about you but if I was going to sabotage something it would be a quick hit and gone. I think a crew was working and cut the cable. The provider is trying to do damage control because so many customers lost service and it’s easy to blame vandals. Just my two cents though.

Assuming this wasn’t an accident, from the extent of the outage it seems that the perpetrators wisely chose where to do the cut. Am I correct in that thinking, or could the same results have been achieved if the cut occurred in many other places?

This is otherwise just another reminder that our near total dependence upon centralized technologically based systems is fragile indeed. We have chosen maximum efficiency in system design rather than erring on the side of mitigating risk via decentralized systems. Maximum efficiency may have made sense in the past but not so much anymore.

Many years ago Sprint went dark. They were almost complete with installing their total fiber optic system. There was one problem. All trunks fed into a single choke point (manhole in this case) before entering their Network Operation Center. A cable fire happened at that point and killed their system nationwide.
Robin

MB, There is usually a main trunk line that goes for hundreds of miles and individual strands come off the main line to customers just like a tree and its branches. The extent of the outage just depends where along the path the trunk was cut. Closer to the root, more customers affected. As long as these fiber runs are it would not be hard to find a spot to cut and cause a major outage. One of the problems with fiber is that it is so fast and has a much higher carrying capacity than copper wire thus more customers or devices are on a single cable. If a cable gets cut the larger the group affected. It really surprised me that they were so open about how vulnerable the system is. I know it needs to be addressed but why put a big flashing sign that says cut this cable and we can’t do anything until its fixed. Nothing like showing the enemy the playbook.

74 it was just a little blip. The words vandalized and terrorists were being screamed so no one would ask questions. The fines from the FCC can be huge as well. They are calculated by the hour. I think it is something like 10k an hour or 250k a day. I believe they can calculate it per customer as well. A cut like this one puts companies out of business and their grandkids grandkids businesses. I’m sure there is far more to this story than is being told.

Also if you read it was only 50% of Arizona “Cellphone, Internet, and telephone services across half of Arizona went dark on Wednesday after vandals sliced a sensitive fiber optic cable, according to those familiar with the situation.”